The First Honey Harvest!

Happy 4th of July!! Around these parts, that’s when you pull your honey supers so that the bees don’t “steal” your honey and take it back down into the hive when it gets dry and hot during July :) So, today, we pulled our honey supers off and did our very first honey harvest!! I can’t say that the bees were super excited… But we were…. Oh, my!! What beautiful delicious honey! So, before we got bees, I was not excited because I don’t even LIKE honey… you know, that “stuff” you buy in little bear shaped jars in grocery stores… yuck. Well, you know what, that stuff is boiled to death, and barely resembles honey… I tasted REAL honey and wondered where this stuff was all my life :)… Anyway…

So, we went out and stole the honey frames… (the bees weren’t 100% super happy with us if I’m being honest…) gently brushed the bees off, and tucked the honey frames into a plastic bin to take into the kitchen…

We have 2 honey supers on that hive, but they’re new hives, and the bees had to draw out all that honeycomb and make the honey, so only the top super was full :) so… we only took the 8 full frames. Here they are in the bin when we took them in.

Here’s a closeup of a beautiful honey frame… It’s no wonder they bees were a little mad that we stole it! Do you know how much work that is?? A lot…So, the next thing to do is use the uncapping tool to take off the “caps” (to make it easier to spin out the honey).

Then, put it in the spinny machine (that’s the fancy word for it)… and out comes liquid gold… The best part… It preserves the honeycomb (mostly) so the bees can repair it, rather than have to rebuild the whole thing!! Don’t be fooled… when I went out to put the empty frames back… They were EXTRA REALLY MAD!! Not only did we steal their honey, but we returned their frames with wax they have to fix… Our normally gentle happy bees, were spitting mad, but I don’t blame them… I’d be mad too!! Just look at this… It’s like magic…

OMGosh… Seriously… This is real honey, and it’s so good. I never understood why people would want to “wreck” their tea by putting yucky honey in it, and now I’m not sure I want to dilute my beautiful honey with tea :)